Panope caressed her hair with a soft hand.
“I don’t know but you are right. Sometimes,” said the Goddess, with a sad, tired look in her eyes, “I think I would be glad to be mortal myself, except that I am glad to be a little comfort to you. I am sorry I came back. Either the world has grown a sad place, or else I had forgotten what it used to be. But I don’t know; I almost broke my heart over Prometheus when I was quite a young thing. I could have helped him take care of his beloved human race a great deal better than Asia, but he never cared anything for me. It is all over long ago. Is there nothing that I can do for you, my dear?”
The mermaid was silent a minute. Then she said:
“I think I should like to take him home to his friends. I know they would wish it should be so.”
“It shall be,” said Panope. “Wait here, and I will bring him to you. But, my dear child, you are so quiet. All the mortal women I ever knew in the old days, in the sea or out, would have torn their hair and screamed, but you are so different.”
The mermaid looked up with a little ghost of a smile, half proud, half pitiful. “I suppose it is because I was born in American waters,” she said.
“Wait but a little,” said Panope. “The whale will take care of you. He is a good creature. His great-grandfathers were pets of mine long ago. I will soon come back again;” and the Nymph was gone.
Some time after the news had come to Salem of the total loss of the brig Sea-nymph, Lucy Peabody was walking alone along the sands. She felt weary, and sat down under the shadow of a rock to rest. The sun was just setting, the west was suffused with a golden glow, the water lay, hardly rippling to a low whispering wind, a sea of fire and glass. Lucy leaned her head against the rock, and sitting there, she dreamed a dream. Along the sands toward her came old Goody Cobb, whom everybody suspected of witchcraft. She appeared so suddenly that Lucy in her dream thought she had come out of the sea.
“Ho! ho!” said Goody Cobb, with a cracked laugh; “so here is Madam Peabody’s lady daughter come out to cry over her disappointment all by herself? The man was a fool, sure enough, but I wouldn’t mind. Just let me write your name down in a little book I keep, and you shall see our fine young madam dwine away like snow in spring-time, and then we shall see—”
“You are out of your mind, Goody,” said Lucy in her dream; “but such talk as that is not safe, for there are those in town who are silly enough to believe witch stories, and you might get yourself into trouble.”